I’ve been without the Internet for two and a half days. Charter was finally able to deduce that one of their techs had cut the wrong cable the other day, so today someone came out to climb the telephone pole and correct their mistake. My account has been credit fifteen whole dollars.

Without the Internet or cable, I’ve been forced to entertain myself in other ways. I’ve been reading a lot (John Dies At the End by David Wong {who is actually Jason Pargin} is so sneakily terrifying that when I went to the bathroom in the middle of last night, I half expected to see a demon in a Michael Jackson mask staring out of the mirror at me) and catching up on my Netflix DVDs. One of those DVDs was About Last Night. I saw this movie sometime in high school, which is when I saw all the movies that, when re-watched later in life, strike me as ridiculously inappropriate in a lot of ways.

Netflix says that About Last Night is the “definitive Brat Pack movie,” although only two people you normally think of belonging to the Brat Pack – Rob Lowe and Demi Moore – are in it. The other two people who get the most time are Jim Belushi, who I can’t remember in anything else from that time, and Elizabeth Perkins, who looks a lot younger than she did in Big, and I could have sworn both movies were made within the same couple of years. Probably the only thing definitively Brat Pack-ish about About Last Night is that it’s set in Chicago, which must have been really fucking cool back in the 80’s or something.

So Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are Dan and Debbie, who have sex the first night they meet (I don’t think it’s a date, but I am unfamiliar with the Brat Pack Constitution) and decide to move in together like three weeks later. Before they even say “I love you,” which becomes the crux of their doomed relationship.

I mean. People. Come on. That soon? Really? We’re talking Chicago in the 80’s, way before Family Matters came out and made it super awesome. The cost of living wasn’t that high. There was no reason to move in so quickly other than Dan’s decision to give Debbie a drawer in his place so she wouldn’t have to carry her “underwear in a bag all over town.” I suppose this is chivalrous, but there was a time when I was sleeping around all over the place across a few neighborhoods and I never carried surplus underwear in a bag wherever I went. I’m not exactly sure why, but for some reason, Dan and Debbie go straight from the Drawer Talk to moving in together, and they’re helped by the only friends they seem to have, Elizabeth Perkins and Jim Belushi. These are probably the most unlikeable friends in all of 80’s cinema (I am including Less Than Zero and The Lost Boys in this comparison, which makes their loathsomeness pretty remarkable). Elizabeth Perkins is a total cunt and Jim Belushi is a boorish dickhead, and they’re both supposed to be loveable even though their only shared redeeming quality is having attractive friends.

Demi Moore is only semi-attractive in About Last Night, at least if we’re trying to compare her to her most attractive era (Striptease, classified by Netflix as a comedy, which I find hilarious). In About Last Night, Demi Moore is 80’s attractive. She has small boobs, unruly eyebrows, and a hideous wardrobe that hides how thin she is. No one would look at her and think she was going to marry Michael Kelso when she was like 60 is what I’m saying.

Rob Lowe, however, is Rob Lowe, and he’s probably at his most attractive in About Last Night. Even with his mini-mullet. I don’t know what it was about the 80’s, but it certainly produced some ridiculously cute guys. Val Kilmer in Real Genius. Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Rob Lowe in everything. Damn, 1980’s. I’ll make you a deal. You can have Gerard Butler and every idiot who made money off the Jackass franchise if you give me young Val Kilmer and Rob Lowe with a junior mullet. Seriously. Let’s make this trade.

When I was younger, I watched About Last Night and thought it was pretty cool. Now that I’m older – older than Dan and Debbie were supposed to be in the movie, actually – I realize that it’s completely ridiculous. It was ridiculous for Dan and Debbie to move in together, it was ridiculous for them to have such terrible friends, and it was ridiculous for a pair of people in their early twenties to treat a 5-month-long romance as though it was the greatest one of their lives, and not only that, but after it ended, to return to one another, wise and embattled, less than a year later. I might be wrong. Maybe Dan and Debbie got married and had babies. Maybe they named their kids things like Brooke and Austin, and then maybe they got an ugly divorce that turned Dan into an alcoholic convenience store worker and Debbie into an overweight SSRI addict. That would be a love story to make a movie about.

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About erineph

I'm Erin. I have tattoos and more than one cat. I am an office drone, a music writer, and an erstwhile bartender. I am a cook in the bedroom and a whore in the kitchen. Things I enjoy include but are not limited to zombies, burritos, Cthulhu, Kurt Vonnegut, Keith Richards, accordions, perfumery, and wearing fat pants in the privacy of my own home.